alt Hacker NewsAt its core antitrust cases are about monopolies and how companies use anti-competitive conduct to maintain their monopoly.
Github isn't the only source control software in the market. Unless they're doing something obvious and nefarious, its doubtful the justice department will step in when you can simply choose one of many others like Bitbucket, Sourcetree, Gitlab, SVN, CVS, Fossil, DARCS, or Bazaar.
There's just too much competition in the market right now for the govt to do anything.
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Picking something other than Github may also have the positive effect that you're less of a target for drive by AI patches.
Can they use Github to their advantage to maintain a monopoly if they are nefarious? Think about it.
> you can simply choose one of many others
Not really. It's a network effect, like Facebook. Value scales quadratically with the number of users, because nobody wants to "have to check two apps".
We should buy out monopolies like the Chinese government does. If you corner the market, then you get a little payout and a "You beat capitalism! Play again?" prize. Other companies can still compete but the customers will get a nice state-funded high-quality option forever.
Minimal changes have occurred to the concept of “antitrust” since its inception as a form of societal justice against corporations, at least per my understanding.
I doubt policymakers in the early 1900s could have predicted the impact of technology and globalization on the corporate landscape, especially vis a vis “vertical integration”.
Personally, I think vertical integration is a pretty big blind spot in laws and policies that are meant to ensure that consumers are not negatively impacted by anticompetitive corporate practices. Sure, “competition” may exist, but the market activity often shifts meaningfully in a direction that is harmful consumers once the biggest players swallow another piece of the supply chain (or product concept), and not just their competitors.